What is the WCF equivalent of an HTTPModule?

Question

Is there some uniform way I can implement behavior that occurs around a set of WCF service calls? I'm looking for a simple way to handle cross-cutting behavior like logging, initialization, error handling, authorization etc. With ASP.NET a lot of this is easy to implement as an HTTPModule.

Any helpful suggestions?

Answer 1

There are a whole bunch of extensibility points in WCF you can use for stuff like this. They include:

• IDispatchMessageInspector
• IErrorHandler
• IParameterInspector
• Behaviors (IServiceBehavior, IEndpointBehavior, IOperationBehavior)

Additionally, you can create custom ServiceHost classes to use either directly or through ServiceHostFactory, and then there's the entire channel stack model which is pretty extensible (if a bit complex at times).